A process of subtraction

I want to describe to you what cannot easily be described in sensory terms, so rather than adding characteristic after characteristic, we will at first proceed by a process of subtraction – and that is one description of how life does it, when we die to the 3D and awaken to the non-3D.

So, there I am on my deathbed. First I lost the power to communicate with the 3D world. This is important, as it begins to re-orient us. We communicate [during life], expecting or anyway hoping for some response. This orients us outward, toward the perceived “other” in the 3D world. When that communication is shut down, we reorient. An analogy might be, sleep. While we sleep, we do not expect to channel our communication toward a perceived-as-separate world that can be accessed only by means of the physical senses. We let that world fall away – or, you might say, we forget it is there. That is the first stage of dying to the 3D, too. We forget the 3D world is there.

Notice, I am not talking about the stages of going from health to death, I’m not describing the process of physical death. I’m describing the process of awakening to the larger world. The re-orientation is a big change The 3D world disappears. It is forgotten. Memory may remain, and dream and fantasy, all needing to be sorted out, but just as in dreams, your awareness is on your end of the communication, not on input from, or output to, a perceived 3D world.

These are simple concepts, and I hope people won’t complicate them by parsing my words too finely. You lose the ability to connect with the “outside” world, you cease to intend to or expect to, and in reorienting you find that your awareness is now upon a world at first consisting entirely of your own mental  constructions.

“You find” doesn’t mean you are aware of the change, though.

No, very much not. Perhaps I should say “it happens,” or “behind your back.” That is a good point. You are not aware of the scene changing, any more than you are when you dream.

So, with the 3D gone, your natural orientation toward it gone, you are more in the world you have experienced in dreams than in any solid stable mental structure. And this, you see, is why what you do in life matters in this regard. Your mental habits may make the transition easier or harder, and will in any case shape it.

I don’t mean to imply that the purpose of life is to assure a smooth transition! That would be like saying the purpose of eating a meal is to make it easier to wash the dishes afterwards. But it does have that effect, and you might as well know it.

I see no point in trying to describe the various worlds people will find that they have, in effect, created for themselves. Let’s stick to what Rita experienced, because Rita is the closest experience I have.

You tend to think of me as Rita now in the non-3D, and so I am, but that isn’t all I am, and therefore it isn’t quite what I am. But our shared Rita experience is the bridge between us, so it is convenient to funnel the communication through that part of me.

So my world constricted, expanded, changed focus. Death turns the knob of the microscope and the plane that had been clear and obvious becomes hazy or non-existent, and other things swim into view.

The world I opened up to, or that filled my consciousness, of course changed as I went along. It unfolded in stages. That’s just the nature of progression, first a little, then more, then before you know it you are in new territory, then you start remembering it, then you are in your new home.

The first stage came when I was still defining myself as Rita. And, see, here is where you are going to have to loosen, without discarding, that analogy to dreaming. Unlike dreaming, or like lucid dreaming in this one respect –.you don’t lose consciousness of yourself as actor or spectator. You are as aware of yourself as experiencer as you ever were aware of yourself as experiencer in waking 3D life. So, it isn’t fantasy and it isn’t mental nor emotional free-flow association either. It could be described as life coming at you, same as always, only now it is entirely subjective and not disguised as “objective” in the sense of being somehow or somewhat disconnected from you.

I heard you saying that with the senses no longer orienting us to life, we still experience ourselves as a consciousness at the center of whatever we experience. Things keep happening, apparently on their own, following some law we don’t necessarily know about, just following their own nature, whatever that may be.

That’s right. That is the first stage after the senses are gone. We still define ourselves as we were, but it looks like the scenery had changed, and then the rules of the game. But that’s for next time. Thanks for your co-operation – you, and anyone reading this. We’re all in this enterprise together.

 

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Rita’s departure

[Rita:] One way to provide that tap is to proceed from the familiar to the less familiar. So let’s revisit my own reawakening and see if that doesn’t provide the explanation with the necessary grounding in the familiar.

I left 3D life in a very deliberate manner, remaining several days in a coma to preserve a stable platform  while I explained what was to come. This avoided quite a few problems. The body, anchored as it is in 3D and 3D’s encasement in a moving and recalcitrant time-frame, provides a stable reference point that allows one to explore the non-3D without the risk of one’s mental projections becoming confused with an “external” reality – whence comes every form of delusion and lost-ness. If one explores and gets “lost,” so to speak, but is still tied to a body in a place and time, one gets reeled back in before too long, and nothing lost and some experience gained.

I see. And that’s what you were doing.

Not consciously from the 3D side, of course. (And, parenthetically, this is another advantage of being on good terms with one’s non-3D aspect; less friction between purposes.) But yes. That’s what I was doing.

When I released the 3D – dropped the body, as TGU always put it – I was conscious already, so did not experience the disorientation that sometimes may occur. But that is not the same as saying that I was instantly aware of all I was, or all I was part of. I had attained a stability of consciousness that would prevent me from losing my sense of myself, and yet that was pretty much all I had, at first.

Like you, like anybody, I had a hodge-podge of ideas about the afterlife, and no way to know which were true, which were false, and which were distortion. The way to find that out is twofold: Experience as in feeling around, and Remembrance as in reconnection. In a sense, the same thing seen two ways. In a sense, very different processes. But we don’t have time to begin on this now, so let us pause until next time.

 

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

The non-3D: a unified view

[Rita:] What I wanted to know in life, and what you want to know, and what some, at least, of our readers will want to know, is,  What is it like to live in the now without restriction? What is it like to live as part of a greater whole, neither losing our identity nor living in isolation? The question, “How do you spend your time? What do you do?,” really amounts to, “What is life in those circumstances?”

Now let me recommend that people read Far Journeys, only heed Bob [Monroe]’s warning that it is necessarily a translation of a translation of a translation, and not take it so literally as to turn it into scripture or lies. By reading it sympathetically, you can get the underlying sense of it between the lines – which is the only way some things can be conveyed.

Bob proceeded from the point of view of 3D and of the individual, and we will work from the opposite end of each polarity – from the non-3D and from the larger-more-comprehensive-than-the-individual. We will not be working in the awful isolation that Bob endured throughout his life.

You and I had the advantage of the community that he established, which could not be as useful to him as it is to those who followed.

He was fortunate – or guided – to have the New Land Community, and [his wife] Nancy, to leaven his isolation; and of course remember that what he did in this aspect of his life was a smaller part of the total time than others might think.

“Always there is life,” Thoreau said, “which, rightly lived, implies a divine satisfaction.”

And a divine dis-satisfaction, too! It is as well to remember that, in moments of discouragement or difficulty. You will remember, I went through years of quiet spiritual depression before the guys arrived to give us new meaning and a new approach.

Let us return to that central image. I am in the eternal “now.” I am Rita as Rita was formed and concreted in nearly nine decades of 3D choosings, but I am also that Rita newly aware of my being only part of a larger and more encompassing being. And I as part of that larger being am aware that I/we are only a part of larger beings, ad infinitum, and smaller ones, because all is ultimately one. There are no absolute divisions in the All-D. So what am I? How do I now experience myself?

It would be as well for you to do some mental stock-taking of all the aspects of the afterlife or heaven or however you think of non-physical life, and see how partial they are:

  • Past lives, for instance.
  • Angels, perhaps in hierarchies. God, perhaps, and the devil.
  • Communities or families in heaven.
  • Bruce Moen’s “hollow heavens” and Bob’s belief-system territories.
  • Lost souls. Souls needing retrieval.
  • “Energies.” Saints, helpers, spirit guides.

And plenty more, and each may make a different list. What is missing is a common way to see all these partially perceived, partially deduced characteristics, and, beyond that, a way to relate that to 3D life in an ordinary and not a “woo-woo” construction. That need not be as impossibly huge a job as it appears; it mostly requires a tap of the kaleidoscope. But it does require that tap.

And the tap, I take it, is your description of life as you experience it.

That’s right. Not as scripture, not as science, not even as anthropology. Just a tap that may function as does the finger pointing at the moon. It isn’t the finger that is important, but the vector it sets up. And a different finger from a different starting-place is not contradiction but confirmation.

And we’ll bear in mind the joke, “Please don’t bite my finger, look where I’m pointing.”

If we get our metaphysical fingers bitten, no great harm.

 

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Structure and the non-3D

]Rita:] There is a now-ness to our life in non-3D that is perhaps more prominent than in yours, and a here-ness that is perhaps less prominent. That’s one statement. A second statement is, we live our lives very differently depending upon whether we are or are not dealing primarily with the 3D’s glare, as I alluded to. Let’s start with these two.

Even in 3D life, it is always here, it is always now. Teachers like Ram Das in my time came to remind us in 3D of that fact, because it changes everything. “Be here, be in the now,” was powerful as the way to begin to escape the mental trance that made life automatic, low-power, misdirected, desperate, empty. It was particularly powerful for those who had not realized that their ordinary life encompassed such adjectives even when not full of drama. No one here can need such a reminder except those aspects recovering from the 3D trance.

I take it you mean, except those parts of non-3D minds that are unable to realize that the conditions of 3D life no longer applied.

What we in the Monroe community used to encounter when we did retrievals, yes. Being “stuck” or being trapped in one’s own mental construction was not what it appeared when you viewed it as if that mind was separate. But we can use that situation, familiar to some on the 3D side, as an entry point. So let us look at it from this side, bearing in mind that we are moving to elucidate the first of today’s points about our now-ness and here-ness.

Our normal is a continual life of awareness centered on the non-3D. We – and I defer defining “we” for a while, but roughly say individual clusters or nodes or coalescences, not individuals one-per-3D-being, of course – we live our aware lives in the eternal now, not pulled from one moment to the next as in 3D, but still affected by changes in 3D-connected aspects of us caused by the lapse of time in the 3D.

Thus, it may be said we live in no-time (because we are always in the now), or in all-time (because we do change, which could not happen if our non-3D dimension were changeless, or in a sort of 3D-influenced time (because changes in our 3D components change us, and those who do not have a 3D component still deal with those who do).

But even though changes induced by or led from 3D conditions, as described at some length last year, do affect us, they are not central to us, in the way they obviously and appropriately are to those within 3D. And that is the balance we are encouraging you to strike: We are not isolated from the 3D; neither are we peripheral to it. [I realize, typing this, “peripheral to it” may be misinterpreted. I got that it means, neither the 3D or the non-3D is central or secondary.] Many a theological and philosophical argument arises from seeing only one half, or neither half, of this statement.

Just as a very young child cannot realize that adults live in a very different world, so a mind still in 3D may find it impossible, or at least very difficult, to realize that it is only a part, and a small part, of the reality we in non-3D experience. For the vast majority of “us,” 3D existence is only a minor part of our life. For a relative few, it is greater. So the non-3D, in its awareness of the eternal now-ness, is a very different environment than the 3D in its carefully constructed remorseless flow of moments. Urgency is gone; irretrievability is gone; competition except voluntary competition is gone.

That – I get – is what Bob [Monroe] was trying to convey in saying AA and BB, et cetera, were playing games. They were active, but there were no circumstances compelling them to do this or that, so anything they did choose to do could be considered to be play.

Yes, but don’t forget the massive distortion in the picture caused by treating various characters – AA and BB particularly! – as if separate when in fact their separate aspect was only relatively separate. But you can’t say everything at once, and he felt and feels he was lucky to get as much said as he did. Within those understood constructions, yes, all activity may be considered playing, just as they may be equally accurately considered as art.

But again, work to remember, we are not primarily engaged in picturing the non-3D as it would appear from within 3D, but as we experience it ourselves. So, again, see us not as individuals cooperating, so much as parts of a great entity, functioning together. Our relative individuality makes our differences and our – specialization, call it. Our essential unity makes the architecture, or our organic inter-relationship. There is an inherent structure to the non-3D no less than there is to the 3D, and a few moments’ thought should convince you that this must be so. Structure does not flow from created 3D: how could it? Structure is the essence from which the 3D was formed.

My point is that the non-3D (as a window on the All-D) is not merely a variant of the 3D. It shares characteristics but in different conditions, hence it manifests differently.

We are all one. We are aware that we live in the eternal now. We relate primarily to each other, which does not exclude the 3D directly or indirectly but does not make it front and center from our point of view.

“Directly or indirectly”?

Directly – meaning those of us in active contact with the 3D via parts of ourselves there. Indirectly – meaning, those without such contacts, dealing with those that do.

 

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Dancing around it

[Me:] It often seems to me that in these sessions we tip-toe toward something, dance around it, decide our time is up, and never quite get to it.

[Rita:] Yes, and yet you see we  do get there, over time. The tip-toing and the dancing around is as much a part of the elucidation as the straight exposition. It is the invisible context that holds the link, what you used to call the carrier wave. Just like Rob Butts describing when the cat would jump up on Jane Roberts while Seth was talking, it keeps you and the later reader remembering that this does  not float in the air but is intrinsically real, continuing, everyday. It is very easy to forget that, and if you do, something very important is lost. Also, it is more effective to dance around a subject, as it seems to you we are doing, than to pursue it in a straight-line fashion. Straight-ahead seems more efficient, but carries the potential to be easily walled off from the rest of your life. Just as when you read a book straight through, not pausing or doing anything else, the contents may form an isolated lump rather than being digested and diffused and becoming part of your being.

It is hard to overcome certain habits of mind, such as impatience and haste.

Hard, but scarcely impossible, nor do you always proceed at the same breakneck pace.

If you in 3D were asked by someone not in 3D how you spend your time, “we relate” might be as good an answer as any, because it is a common denominator among so many activities and preoccupations that might not be so easily described, and certainly would be impossible to describe in their infinite interactions. Generalized almost meaningless statements are the natural result of attempting to explain unknowns. You remember Bob [Monroe]’s description of showing a non-3D person life in 3D.

I do. BB, in Far Journeys.

Yes. Remember – Bob explicitly reminded the reader that everything he tried to show would necessarily be distorted by translation into words, into sequential logic, into all sorts of unacknowledged assumptions.

But, “you do the best you can.”

Right, and that’s our task now, to do the best we can because our conditions and perceptions and assumptions and experience are different from Bob’s, and so will complement his and at the same time inform his.

We must not leave the impression that what Bob was able to convey was gospel, any more than what we can bring forth. Nor are contradictions in description important in themselves. You don’t want dogma, you want doorways, things that lead on, that give the impetus to look in a certain direction, to make certain connections. Our hope is to cut doorways where people have only seen walls. Not that we are “going where man had never gone before,” but that we are demonstrating that the walls were never real in the first place, so why not have a doorway here, or a window? This kind of encouragement of imagination can only be done one person at a time. Each person reading this is part of a unique equation of Rita (for TGU) / Frank (for sequential exposition) / reader (for association of the material with everything else in his or her life). There is no mass communication, no matter how widely we scatter the seed. There is only one-to-one, and that unpredictable.

 

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

Ideas and civilizations

Saturday, December 14, 2024

5:10 a.m. Shall we continue?

You started to steer the conversation, then struck out your question and left it to us. Why?

More interested in where you wanted to go than what had occurred to me. I can never tell how much of my motivation is “me” and how much an intuition from the universe and how much perhaps the product of some robot.

Not that it matters.

Well, you say that, and I can get a sense of it – that since we are all one thing, what difference does it make what causes what to surface. Still, it seems to make a difference.

It does, of course. A philosophy is at a different level from a prejudice, say, or a knee-jerk reaction, or a reasoned position based on other premises. But at the same time, in a sense it doesn’t matter (which is the same as saying “All is well”) because the world isn’t drifting.

This reminds me of a thought I had yesterday (and lost until now) that I did want us to discuss.

Yes, and if you go looking for the source of an idea – sources, rather – you will waste a certain amount of time and energy, because what difference does it make? If Leonardo da Vinci could find inspiration in a pool of water or a mottled wall, why should anybody worry that the diamond they just found may have come from a dunghill?

My thought may have come from Paul Brunton, prepared by earlier exposure to Carl Jung. Hardly dunghills. But I get your point.

And you are hesitating at the brink because it is a sort of impractical-sounding question.

Very well, I cease to hesitate. I thought, people have said that if the physical world really exists as a sort of epiphenomenon, that means it depends upon not being forgotten by whatever is dreaming it. Thus, if God were to forget us, we would cease to exist, is how the theologians would put it. But there is another way to phrase the understanding that doesn’t involve postulating a separate God. But although I can intuit it, I cannot put words around it. I’m hoping you can, because I think it is the kind of understanding that could be quite a doorway.

Bullets, then, and we’ll see if we can fence it in:

  • Your 3D existence is a subset of your non-3D existence, necessarily since the 3D in general is a subset of the non-3D.
  • But your 3D existence – your life on the avatar level – depends upon the existence of many things: time, space, genetics, and the non-3D seeds you call other lives, or threads.
  • All is one, all time is part of the eternal now, there are no divisions in any direction except provisional, temporary, illusory barriers that nonetheless appear real and even formidable.
  • Thought, too, is all one, and at the same time is locally divisible.
  • No civilization, any more than any individual, can do justice to every aspect of reality. The more one accents one end of a given polarity, the more one neglects the compensating “opposite” end of the polarity.
  • Thus, every thought, every structure of any kind, is necessarily incomplete and – you might say – unfair.
  • What is the succession of days but the trying out of this or that emphasis? And given that we are talking about not one set of polarities but many, you can see the amazing complexity of the resulting creations. The Renaissance in Europe, the Taoist or Muslim or Christian or Jainist understandings of reality, the materialist hypothesis, magicians, devil-worshippers, ecstatics – you see the point.

I do. Infinite diversity, and different times call forth different manifestations, like an art gallery continually changing its displays.

Now, you as individual at the avatar level usually function as if separate. Even if you experience telepathic contact with others, usually you experience it as you (the individual) experiencing other (humans, or ex-humans or never-been-human). You don’t usually experience the sense of oneness that puts you as avatar in your proper place as both center and nowhere.

Sometimes we do.

If no one ever did, how could we describe it? We said usually.

Yes, I got that. It still seemed worth noting in case it didn’t occur to people.

All right. Since you function as if separate (and of course this is by design, it is not a malfunction or imperfection), you do not usually sense your theoretical fragility of existence.

That could use a little clarifying.

“If God forgot us, we would cease to exist.” Only, for God substitute the group-mind that is everything.

Is there a difference?

Difference in associations people will make to different words. The word God will raise resistances in some, as you well know. The idea of a universal group-mind will raise resistances in others, particularly if expanded to include what is seen as non-living “matter,” as it must if it is to include everything. And any conception that proceeds from postulates and assumptions and associations different from one’s own will necessarily appear biased, perhaps ludicrously so. It is hard to hold one’s own view and at the same time look from another window.

It seems to be the nature of religions – including scientism – to rigorously exclude opposing views. What is heresy, after all, or superstition, but unacceptable modes of thought?

Yes, well, you are going to have to find ways to do what has till now been impossible. Your new civilization will be broad-minded or it will fail. But of course even broad-mindedness is one position, that excludes certain extremes. As we say, you can’t have any positive expression that includes everything. At best you may get a negative expression like Taoism that says to each successive attempt to define the world, “No, it isn’t that either.” You can see that such a recurring negative may be quite valuable against fanatism but may also lack a certain something that people need.

I can’t tell, looking back on this, if we have succeeded in saying anything that will be intelligible to people who don’t already get it. But then, that’s what you often say, isn’t it? We are connected, and sparks jump.

Could you trace the origin of the ideas that occur to you? By looking carefully you can sometimes see how they connect with other things, how they latch onto the moving train that is your momentary consciousness, but that says nothing important about the mechanism or nature of organization of ideas. Nor – we repeat – is it necessary or even helpful to trace such relationships. They may interest you, and if so, fine. But they are not important per se. You have spent your entire life reacting to ideas without knowing why they came when they did, or how. You will spend the remainder of your life the same way. If isn’t in any way a problem.

But I still can’t tell if anything I wanted to convey comes through. You will say, it isn’t my business who picks up what, but I’d say what is my business is, did I make as clear a statement as I could?

Perhaps you will receive “external” feedback.

Perhaps. Well, I can feel my mind wandering a little, so I guess this is it for the moment. Thanks as always.

 

Relating

[Me:] Rita? The world – that is, all-D, 3D and non-3D both — from TGU’s point of view?

[Rita:] The object of this second run is to give the same facts a second look from somewhat the opposite perspective. So in a way there will be nothing new, but in a way it will all be different.

It reminds me, what you’re saying here, of how the Indians and the plainsmen kept themselves oriented. Every so often they would look back, to see what the country they were traversing looked like from the other direction, so it would be recognizable.

They were giving themselves perspective, orienting themselves in a 360-degree rather than a 180-degree fashion, you might say. Yes, that’s what we’re doing here. Any exploration can be describe going forward, or going back over the ground, but it is more orienting to do it both ways if possible, and an aerial view would be so much the better. Bear in mind, then, our intent is not to describe something no one has ever seen before; it is to describe relationship between things seen and not so well understood. That includes anything you and I ever discussed, whether I was in or out of body.

We have already sketched life in 3D and non-3D from the point of view of the 3D-bound individual. Now we are looking at the same reality from the point of view of the non-3D-bound individual – not, exactly, your own non-3D component (though that is part of it) but the dweller in these parts not particularly bound by a tie to 3D, the non-3D neighborhood as it appears to each other. The logic of our lives once the intense 3D focus is no longer out-glaring subtler lights. Our center of gravity firmly placed here, not tugged at from 3D. You remember, I asked once how TGU spent their time, and they said, “we relate.”

I remember they said, “You might think of us as teachers, but what if we said we were roofers?” Meaning, the nature of their occupations couldn’t be easily related to us because we would find it hard not to force any explanation into 3D terms.

And one way of looking at events would say that that interchange was for the purpose of establishing this conceptual link between us, I being on both sides of that questioning and therefore being uniquely able to understand the needs of the questioner and the constraints on the responder – and you being able to establish or hold the continuity. So, we’re setting out to answer the question left open – what does it mean, “we relate”?

 

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.